Briefing on Cultural Theory: Key Concepts and Debates

Briefing on Cultural Theory: Key Concepts and Debates

Executive Summary

This document synthesizes a wide-ranging body of scholarship on the analysis of culture, revealing several pivotal shifts and ongoing debates in the field. A primary development is the “cultural turn” in sociology, which has repositioned culture from a discrete object of study to a fundamental analytical lens for understanding all social phenomena. This “cultural sociology” insists that meaning-making is not a derivative of social structure but is autonomous and constitutive of social life itself.

Concurrent with this shift is a robust critique of universalist, Western-centric theories. Scholars now emphasize “provincializing Europe,” examining how non-Western cultural forms, postcolonial histories, and subaltern modes of resistance challenge and enrich sociological understanding. This has led to a focus on multiplicity, hybridity, and the complex dynamics of globalization, where tendencies toward cultural convergence (“McDonaldization”) are met with powerful forces of differentiation and local adaptation.

A significant area of contention involves the application of Darwinian analogies to culture, particularly memetics and theories of creativity. The provided analysis reveals a deep skepticism toward these analogies, which are often critiqued as being tautological, descriptively inadequate, or explanatorily trivial. The concept of “blind variation” in creativity is shown to be a poor fit for the guided, knowledge-based processes of human innovation.

Across disciplines, culture is increasingly analyzed as a performed, embodied, and ritualized phenomenon. From political ceremonies and rites of passage to the everyday performance of gender and authenticity, ritual is seen as a crucial mechanism for creating solidarity, identity, and social order. This focus is complemented by the study of art and aesthetics, not as mere leisure, but as a primary mode of intelligence—a “rationality of feeling”—that offers a unique path to knowledge and stands in opposition to purely instrumental forms of reason.

Finally, the analysis highlights the profound impact of media and technology on social organization, perception, and power. The transition from print to electronic and digital media is shown to reconfigure social boundaries, lived experience, and the very structure of the nation-state. In this context, described by some as “liquid modernity,” culture is understood as a dynamic field of institutional production, political contestation, and the ongoing construction of meaning in a globalized world.

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I. Foundational Shifts in Cultural Analysis

From Sociology of Culture to Cultural Sociology: The Strong Program

A central transformation in the study of culture has been the move from a “sociology of culture” to a “cultural sociology.” This shift is most forcefully articulated by the “Strong Program,” championed by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith.

• Sociology of Culture (Traditional View): Treats culture as a dependent variable, an object to be explained by “harder,” more concrete social forces like economics, politics, or demographics. Culture is often seen as a reflection or derivative of social structure.
• Cultural Sociology (The Strong Program): Advocates for the “relative autonomy of culture.” It argues that culture—as a rich web of symbols, codes, narratives, and meanings—is not merely a reflection of a social base but is an independent force that shapes institutions, social action, and historical outcomes. The Strong Program’s goal is to uncouple culture from social structure for analytical purposes to understand its internal logics and causal power.

The intellectual foundations for this turn are traced to thinkers like Wittgenstein, French structuralists (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss), and cultural anthropologists (Geertz, Douglas, Turner), alongside classical sociologists like Durkheim and Weber. The Strong Program aims to apply this perspective to a wide range of social phenomena, from social movements and the state to cultural trauma and identity.

Critiques of Modernity and Western-Centrism

Contemporary cultural analysis is marked by a deep-seated critique of the universalist and often Western-biased assumptions of classical sociology.

• Provincializing Europe: This concept, articulated by scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty, challenges the notion that theoretical terms generated by Europeans are universally applicable. The task is not to celebrate cultural relativism but to reveal the intricate connections between multiple expressions of the “modern” and the “traditional,” recognizing that the West does not define the only path.
• Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies: These fields have been crucial in giving voice to non-dominant groups and analyzing non-hegemonic cultural forms.
  • Resistance: Subaltern studies document forms of resistance not only through overt conflict but also through cultural negation, inversion, and the use of local customs, magic, and oral traditions.
  • Gender and the Nation: This work highlights how women’s bodies often become symbolic icons for the nation in both colonial and nationalist discourses, serving as sites for constructing “tradition” and “modernity.” Lata Mani’s work on the debate over sati (widow immolation) in colonial India shows how women were deployed as symbols, not subjects.
• Liquid Modernity: Zygmunt Bauman uses this term to describe the current phase of modernity, contrasting it with the “solid” modernity of the postwar period. Liquid modernity is characterized by:
  • The rejection of fixed paradigms and routines.
  • A culture consisting of “offers, not norms,” primarily addressing clients to be seduced rather than a “people” to be cultivated.
  • The shift from a proselytizing mission of universal enlightenment to a state of diasporas and global interconnectedness where identity is detached from territory.

The Darwinian Analogy and Its Critics

A persistent theme in cultural theory is the application of Darwinian evolutionary principles to explain cultural change. This approach, however, is subject to extensive and forceful criticism, particularly in the realms of memetics and creativity. The central argument against these analogies is that they are often descriptively inaccurate, tautological, or explanatorily trivial.

1. Memetics: The Flawed “Gene-Meme” Analogy

Memetics proposes that culture evolves through the differential replication of “memes”—units of cultural transmission analogous to genes. This framework is criticized on several fundamental grounds.

• Tautology Problem: The core principle of memetics, the “survival of the fittest meme,” is often considered an empty tautology. A meme’s fitness is defined by its success in spreading, but its spreading is then explained by its fitness. Without independent “source laws” (general statements about why certain memes have high replication potential), this simply re-labels a phenomenon (e.g., a “catchy” tune) without explaining it.
• Lack of a Clear Replicator: The analogy with the gene, a discrete, high-fidelity replicator, breaks down when applied to culture.
  • Ontological Ambiguity: Memeticists disagree on what a meme is—an idea, a brain pattern, a behavior, an artifact. Unlike the gene’s clear substrate (DNA), memes have multiple, ill-defined substrates.
  • Low Copy-Fidelity: Social learning is not a high-fidelity replication process. Ideas are reconstructed and transformed during transmission, not copied verbatim. This process is more Lamarckian (inheritance of acquired characteristics) than Darwinian, as imperfections accumulate.
  • The Triggering Problem: Much of social learning involves “triggering” pre-existing cognitive capacities or knowledge rather than copying new information. Gene replication, in contrast, is a direct copying process without relying on a pre-existing “phenotype” to be triggered.
• Heuristic Triviality: When stripped of its problematic claims, the gene-meme analogy often merely “reinvents the wheel.” The idea that there are sharable, transmissible ideational units of culture is a foundational concept in anthropology and sociology. Memetics adds a new vocabulary but little new explanatory power.

2. Creativity: The Myth of “Blind Variation”

The “origination analogy” posits that creativity, like biological evolution, is a process of blind variation and selective retention. This view is challenged by a close analysis of the creative process.

• Creativity vs. Learning: Psychological creativity is defined by its partial independence from direct learning or experience. It involves spontaneity and is not fully determined by prior knowledge.
• “Blind Variation” Misinterpreted: The concept of “blindness” in Darwinian evolution means that variations (mutations) are statistically uncorrelated with their potential adaptive benefit. Proponents of the Darwinian creativity model apply this to human innovation.
• The Reality of Guided Variation: Critics argue that human creativity is rarely, if ever, truly blind in the Darwinian sense.
  • Goal-Directedness: Creative problem-solving is typically guided by a goal. Variations are not generated completely at random but are constrained by the problem’s parameters and the creator’s existing knowledge.
  • The Role of Knowledge and Heuristics: Previously acquired knowledge, expertise, and heuristics create a strong adaptive bias in the generation of new ideas. This is fundamentally different from developmental constraints in biology, which may restrict possible variations but do not actively guide them toward a solution in response to a specific environmental pressure (a process known as coupling). The creative process is characterized by such coupling.
• Lack of Explanatory Force: The Darwinian approach to creativity often amounts to the claim that creativity is “guesswork” or involves unjustified trials. While true, this is a widely accepted view. The model fails to provide a convincing cognitive mechanism for how these trials are generated, often falling back on untestable hypotheses like unconscious “chance permutations.” Evidence cited, such as the “equal-odds rule” (a creator’s hit rate does not improve over their career), is merely compatible with the model but does not prove it over other cognitive theories.

II. Core Concepts in Cultural Sociology

Culture as Performance and Ritual

A powerful lens in cultural sociology is the analysis of social life as a series of performances and rituals. This approach, with roots in Durkheim, sees ritualized action as a primary mechanism for generating collective emotions, solidarity, identity, and moral order.

• The Durkheimian Model: Rituals are mechanisms that produce “collective effervescence,” reaffirming group values and creating a shared reality. Contemporary media events, such as the Olympic Games, can function as powerful rituals in this sense, creating a sense of communion among viewers.
• Strategic and Contingent Ritual: Modern theorists have moved beyond a purely functionalist view, emphasizing the strategic and contingent nature of ritual.
  • Pierre Bourdieu highlights how rituals facilitate strategic action and serve as sites for the exercise of symbolic power and the creation of distinction.
  • Randall Collins focuses on “interaction ritual chains,” arguing that successful rituals (defined by co-presence, mutual focus, and shared emotion) generate “emotional energy,” which in turn motivates future action and cements group membership. Failed rituals have their own negative consequences.
  • Jeffrey Alexander proposes a theory of “cultural pragmatics,” viewing social action as a performance. A successful performance requires the fusion of various elements (script, actors, audience, means of production, mise-en-scène) into a compelling experience. The success of a ritual is therefore not guaranteed but is a contingent outcome.
• Performance of Identity:
  • Gender Performance: Gender is not only “done” implicitly in everyday life but is also explicitly “performed” in institutionalized settings (e.g., beauty pageants, drag shows, cheerleading). These heightened performances make visible the otherwise taken-for-granted scripts and power dynamics of gender.
  • The Performance of Authenticity: Authenticity is not an objective quality but a social construct that must be performed, staged, and crafted to meet audience expectations. Sociologists demystify this process by examining the rhetorical strategies used by cultural authorities, the production processes of cultural organizations, and the dramaturgical impression management of individuals.
  • Rites of Passage: Rituals are central to marking life transitions. Contemporary research explores the creation of new, secular rites of passage (e.g., for children in Poland) to serve functions traditionally held by religious ceremonies, aiming to be more inclusive in diverse societies.

Discourse, Narrative, and Memory

Culture is fundamentally constituted through language, storytelling, and the social construction of the past.

• Discourse vs. Narrative:
  • Discourse refers to sequential talk in the moment, where meaning evolves through intersubjective give-and-take.
  • Narrative is a worked-out whole, with a beginning, middle, and end, that links events and emplots them with meaning. Narrators, however, are often poor social scientists, as their accounts are shaped by culturally inscribed ideologies rather than an objective view of structural forces.
• The Power of Silence: What is omitted from a narrative is as important as what is said. Narrative silence can be a form of censorship, a strategy of control, or an indicator of macro-level discursive processes that expunge certain events or memories from the group account.
• Collective Memory: Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational concept posits that memory is not purely individual but is socially framed. Groups construct a shared past that sustains their identity. Recent scholarship has focused on:
  • Commemoration: Commemorative rituals are vehicles for collective memory, inducing participants to experience past events vicariously.
  • Difficult Pasts: A key area of study is the commemoration of negative events like the Holocaust or slavery. Such commemorations often preserve struggles over meaning rather than producing a unified memory, highlighting the role of political contention.
  • Honor vs. Dignity Cultures: Barry Schwartz argues that the nature of collective memory differs between “honor cultures” (e.g., in East Asia), where national shame and humiliation are central, and “dignity cultures” (e.g., in the West), where violations of individual rights are paramount. This explains the intractability of memory disputes between nations like Japan, China, and Korea.

Aesthetics, Art, and the Education of Feeling

Drawing from The Symbolic Order, this perspective argues that art and aesthetics are not peripheral leisure activities but a primary mode of human intelligence and a quest for meaning.

• The Aesthetic Mode of Intelligence: The aesthetic is defined as a mode of intelligence working not through concepts but through percepts, structures of feeling, and sensory experience. It is a distinct but equally valid way of knowing and apprehending the world, complementary to deductive reason.
• Art as a Quest for Truth: This view rejects the idea that art is mere self-expression or therapy. Instead, it is seen as an epistemological activity—a primary way to pursue truth, meaning, and understanding. As Joseph Conrad stated, the artist’s task is “to make you hear, to make you feel, to make you see.”
• The Education of Feeling: A key purpose of arts education is to counter “instrumental rationality”—the preoccupation with “how to do it” over “why do it,” which dissociates reason from feeling. Literature and the arts educate feeling by extending sympathy and prompting a more lively apprehension of the experiences of others and the non-human world.
• The Rationality of Feeling: This concept, argued by David Best, refutes the subjectivist notion that the arts are purely about ineffable, private experiences. It posits that:
  • Feeling is not opposed to cognition; rather, an emotional feeling is an expression of a certain understanding of an object.
  • There is a form of “interpretative reasoning” central to the arts, where reasons are given to support a new interpretation or evaluation, which can change one’s feelings.
  • Therefore, feelings can be educated because the conceptual understanding that underpins them can be developed and refined.
• Myth, Tradition, and the Creative Process: The artist does not create in a vacuum but enters a “symbolic order” or tradition. The creative process is a dialogue between a subjective impulse and the objective medium with its own history and constraints. Myth and legend provide foundational blueprints for the imagination, reconciling the inner world of impulse with the outer world of experience.
• Aesthetics After Modernism: The collapse of the modernist belief in a single, historically necessary style (“the end of art”) has led to a state of pluralism where “anything is permitted.” Peter Fuller argues for a renewed aesthetics grounded in the “potential space” (Winnicott) between subjective and objective reality, where cultural experience redeems us from the “insult of the Reality Principle.” He critiques modernism’s rejection of ornament and its submission to a purely functional or anaesthetic logic.
• Critique of Deconstruction: George Steiner offers a sharp critique of post-structuralist theories that claim texts have no author or subject and that reading is impossible. He argues that this leads to a “playful nihilism.” As an alternative, he proposes a hermeneutic wager, a “contract with the text,” based on the axiom “We must read as if the text before us had meaning.” This postulate of meaningfulness is necessary for any responsible engagement with art.

The Materiality of Culture: Bodies, Media, and Environment

Culture is not merely ideational; it is inscribed in bodies, transmitted through media, and built into the physical environment.

• The Sociology of the Body: Scholars like Bourdieu and Foucault have been foundational.
  • Bourdieu emphasizes the habitus, where social origins become embodied through dispositions, postures, and tastes, serving as a mechanism for social reproduction.
  • Foucault analyzes how power operates directly on the body through disciplinary regimes in institutions like prisons and schools.
  • Feminist and critical race scholars add that socially defined ideals of beauty and fashion are structured by, and contribute to, inequalities of gender and race.
• Medium Theory: This approach, associated with Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, argues that the physical characteristics of a society’s dominant communication media—apart from their content—shape social organization, consciousness, and power.
  • Print Culture: Promoted linear, abstract thought, individualism, and the segmentation of social life into distinct institutions (schools, prisons, hospitals). The fixed viewpoint of print helped create the bounded, imagined community of the nation-state.
  • Electronic Culture: Fosters a focus on feeling, appearance, and mood. It breaks down the information barriers between social groups (e.g., men and women, adults and children) and undermines the print-based authority of the nation-state by creating transnational flows of information and culture.
• The Built Environment: The human-constructed environment is a site where cultural meaning and economic forces intersect.
  • As Capitalist Commodity: The built environment is shaped by the conflict between its “exchange value” (profit for owners) and its “use value” (shelter and community for residents).
  • As Cultural Symbol: It embodies and reproduces social divisions (e.g., gender roles in the Kabylian house) and political power (e.g., the gardens of Versailles).
  • Bourdieu’s Integrated Model: Explains architectural styles (e.g., modernism) as the result of the interaction between the habitus of consumers (their class-based tastes) and the structure of the professional field of architects (its autonomy from the market).

III. Culture in Action: Institutions and Global Processes

Institutional Fields of Culture

Culture is produced, distributed, and evaluated within specific institutional fields, each with its own logics and power dynamics.

• High Culture and the Art World:
  • The “High Culture Model”: Traditionally involves nonprofit organizations (museums, orchestras) governed by elite trustees, supported by philanthropy and government, and seen as preserving a sacred artistic canon.
  • Contemporary Pressures: This model is challenged by marketization, populist demands from funders, and the blurring of boundaries between high and popular culture, leading to the rise of the “cultural omnivore” among elites.
  • The Contemporary Art Market (Chelsea, NYC): Analysis of the Chelsea gallery district reveals a complex interplay of global and local forces. The market is influenced by international art fairs, auction houses, and the internet, but also by the local Manhattan real estate market. The content of the art itself reflects themes like the problematic family, politics, and abstraction, challenging simple theories of class homology.
• Popular Culture:
  • Production of Culture Perspective: Focuses on how symbolic elements are shaped by the systems in which they are created, distributed, and evaluated (e.g., technology, law, industry structure).
  • Digital Transformations: In music, digital technology has revolutionized production (the professional-amateur or “pro-am” studio), distribution (file-sharing), and consumption. This has led to the rise of “new amateurs” (bloggers, YouTubers) who blur the line between producer and consumer.
• Science, Medicine, and Law:
  • Science Cultures: Science is not a monolithic entity but a collection of dynamic “science cultures” anchored in specific material arrangements (labs, technologies), skills, and communication processes. These cultures are defined by the drawing of boundaries between science and non-science, and between different disciplines.
  • Medical Cultures: Biomedicine, while often seen as universal, is practiced, organized, and consumed in specific local contexts. Research distinguishes between “the culture of medicine” (the training and professional culture of physicians, which shapes their worldview) and “culture in medicine” (how cultural beliefs of patients affect health and illness). The push for “cultural competence” in healthcare is a key site of this dynamic.
  • Legal Cultures: This concept refers to the attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behavior towards law. Research focuses on “legal consciousness”—how ordinary people experience and use law—and how law functions as a symbolic system that constructs social reality.

Globalization, Consumption, and Cultural Production

A central debate in cultural sociology concerns the effects of globalization.

• Convergence vs. Differentiation:
  • Convergence Thesis (“McDonaldization”): Argues that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, driven by the logic of efficiency, calculability, and predictability, as exemplified by American consumer capitalism.
  • Differentiation and Hybridity: A more widely supported view holds that global cultural products and forms are localized, reinterpreted, and hybridized. Global retailing, for example, succeeds not by imposing uniformity but by catering to and creating locally specific consumer lifestyles and identities.
• The Political Economy of Cultural Production:
  • Spatialization: Vincent Mosco uses this term to describe how communication technologies overcome the constraints of space and time, allowing for the global restructuring of industries and the creation of flexible, networked corporations.
  • Format Licensing: A key strategy in global television (e.g., American Idol, Wife Swap) where a successful program’s format is licensed and adapted for local markets. This centralizes control over the concept while allowing for localized content, embodying the “global/local” dynamic.
• Consumption as Critique and Identity: The “cultural turn” shifted the study of consumption from a focus on use-value to sign-value. Consumers are not seen as passive “cultural dopes” but as active agents who appropriate goods to construct and express their identities. This has led to a view of consumption as an arena of unprecedented individual freedom and choice, though this is now being challenged by concerns over inequality and sustainability.

The State, Politics, and Civil Society

Culture is central to the constitution of political power, the state, and the public sphere.

• The Cultural Construction of the State: The state is not just a set of institutions but is also a powerful cultural formation. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s The Great Arch shows how English state formation involved the regulation and moralization of social life, shaping human subjectivity itself. This includes the creation of state rituals, ceremonies, and “political religions” that generate solidarity and legitimacy.
• Cultures of Politics: This approach, articulated by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, examines how groups in civil society develop distinct styles for engaging in public talk. It focuses on how people, in specific settings, learn to politicize or depoliticize issues, rather than assuming that politics is only about ideology or structural position. A group’s style (its speech norms, group bonds, and boundaries) can enable or constrain its ability to engage in wider public debate.
• Publics and the Public Sphere:
  • Habermas: Theorized the emergence of a “bourgeois public sphere” in the 18th century as a space for rational-critical debate, which he saw as later declining into a sphere of media-driven manipulation.
  • Arendt: Offers a complementary view of the public sphere as a “space of appearance,” where citizens exercise freedom through speech, performance, and persuasion. The political is about reaching informed opinion, not absolute truth.
  • These perspectives provide a framework for analyzing how various publics (counter-publics, subaltern publics) are culturally constituted and engage in political life.

Identity, Boundaries, and Pluralism

Culture is the medium through which individual and collective identities are formed and social boundaries are drawn.

• Culture and Self: The self is not a pre-social entity but is constituted through cultural discourses and practices. Individuals selectively adopt and refashion elements from their distributed cultural heritages to weave into identities.
• Moral and Symbolic Boundaries: Michèle Lamont’s work shows how people draw “symbolic boundaries” to define who they are and who they are not. These boundaries can be moral (based on honesty, integrity), cultural (based on taste, refinement), or socioeconomic. They are key tools in processes of stratification and exclusion.
• Race and Color-Blind Ideology: In contemporary societies, race is increasingly understood as a fluid social construction. A key cultural phenomenon is “color-blind racism” (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva), an ideology that allows for the preservation of racial inequality through non-racialist language (e.g., “market dynamics,” “cultural deficiencies”) while stigmatizing attempts to address racism directly.
• Models of Multiculturalism: Scholars identify several competing models for managing diversity:
  • Cosmopolitanism: Emphasizes individual choice, tolerance, and weak group boundaries.
  • Fragmented Pluralism: Focuses on the existence of distinct, self-contained communities with strong internal boundaries.
  • Interactive Pluralism: Posits the need to cultivate common understanding across distinct groups through mutual recognition and ongoing interaction.